


Naufrage

by ariadnes_string



Category: Cretan Labyrinth Stories (Greek Mythology), Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drug Use, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 07:38:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13142073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: In the Mediterranean, many are lost, but some are found.





	Naufrage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lightningwaltz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/gifts).



> It's hard to think about these old stories of the Mediterranean without thinking of the current crisis there--but this story makes no claim to historical or legal accuracy.

Have you ever woken up with blood under your fingernails that isn’t yours? I never thought I would—me, Ariadne, who’d grown up rich, safe, powerful, in a palatial house that had belonged to her family since time immemorial. But the world runs mad these days, and so do I.

+++

I first saw him after the riot. The police put us in with the working girls, and I thought he was their pimp come to free them. But I misjudged him, underestimated him. He posted bail for everyone that night.

“Why?,” I asked him later. 

“All people driven mad by desire are my people,” he said. “I take care of them as best I can.”

What pretentious bullshit, I thought at the time. That wasn’t what the riot was about at all. But when he asked me whether I had anywhere to sleep that night, I didn’t lie, just shook my head.

“Come back with me,” he said. “Just until you figure things out.”

Did I go with him because I no longer cared whether I lived or died? Or did I go with because I saw a new life opening before me? To this day, I cannot tell.

It was only when I was in the dingy, crossing the still harbor towards the magnificent yacht with _Ecstasy_ painted across her bow, that I realized who this man, with the rumpled, expensive suit, the unruly hair, the dark unearthly eyes, was. Dionysus, scion of a family even older than mine, so old no one remembered the source of their vast wealth and power. He saw the knowledge dawning in my face, and smiled.

+++

My father called everything the sea gave us his tribute. Men, beasts, broken ships, lost cargo. Of course, these days the sea gave him more men than anything else. Migrants, refugees, asylum seekers. It didn’t matter what the world called them. To my father, they were tribute. How could they know they’d picked the wrong island to wash up on?

I kept the books. I closed my eyes to the fact that my father dealt in people as well as goods. Years at a mainland university had honed my gift for words and numbers, left me able to navigate any bureaucratic labyrinth, to make the cruelest of my father’s activities appear legal. 

My brother took care of the more, shall we say, physical aspects of the operation. Like me, he had been sent away to learn necessary skills—in his case to elite, private military training. He had proved talented in these areas, and had spent time in the employ of other countries, other warlords. He enjoyed it, he told me once, but in the end, it had left him something less than human.

+++

That first night, Dionysus knelt in front of me and cleaned the blood from my hands with a pristine white cloth.

I hoped the blood belonged to the police, or to the guards, but I couldn’t remember. Grief, or fury, or madness had come over me as the people in the camp had swarmed into the streets of the island's port, myself among them. I wasn’t sure if it had receded yet. When Dionysus touched the cloth to the scratches on my face, I realized it might be my own blood after all.

It seemed wrong to have someone so powerful perform a task so mundane, but he shrugged.

“You are lost, but under this you are beautiful. I hope you will stay with me for a while.”

When he offered me wine in a crystal goblet, wine richer than any I had had before, I drank it gratefully.

+++

Why did I leave my father’s island? To ask this is to ask why Theseus, of all the men who washed ashore, caught my eye and then my heart.

Perhaps because after so many solitary travelers, he was so clearly the leader of those with whom he had been shipwrecked. He told me later he had been a prince in his own village—all I knew it might have been true, his lands were a mystery to me, despite my schooling. When his village was destroyed by war and drought, he led his people first across a terrible desert, then through the land of a vicious warlord, and finally into the treacherous sea, in search of a new life. Many would have been lost without his wisdom and his strength—I could see it in the way they looked at him, the way he taught them to cleave to each other.

It was new to me, this capacity to put the needs of others before your own, so different from my own family. I admired it with a kind of yearning fascination. A yearning it was easy to mistake for love. Or perhaps it really was love—he was certainly thrilling to look at, with his midnight skin, and long limbs, and a voice as stirring as a cello.

+++

I was high the first time I slept with Dionysus. I had been so for days, my intoxication a new baseline for me. Each night, Dionysus summoned one of the beautiful girls who lived on the _Ecstasy_ to his cabin. Sometimes one of the boys. Never me. It was not a situation for which my upbringing had prepared me, but I was numb to everything in those early days, and so I looked on without attraction or repulsion, still lost in my grief.

__

But one evening as we sailed between islands, no moon in the starry sky, he appeared before me and took my hand, as gentle as when he had cleaned my face after the riot. 

“Ariadne?” he asked, and it seemed such a genuine question, that I answered yes.

The first thing I learned in Dionysus’ bed is that, despite their claims, none of the men I had been with before had truly loved women’s bodies. That night, Dionysus paid tribute to all the folds and hollows of mine, showing me how pleasure hid in spaces I had barely known myself. He peeled away my numbness like a grape skin, and drank between my thighs with a reverence I thought he reserved for his treasured vintages.

When he pulled me up to straddle him, I couldn’t tell if our rhythm was his, mine, or the waves rocking the ship. Beneath me, his eyes were as black as the moonless sky, all pupil. His climax pitched me like a storm, but I hung on, determined to stay the course.

+++

Like me, Theseus had been sent by his family to university, to learn the skills of the modern world. Even better, he spoke all the languages in which business is done. Never one to waste a resource, my father began to let him work with me in the office. It was there he told me his story. It was there, in the false light of the computer screens, that I was seduced. Not by his hands and kisses, but by his words. Like that other Mediterranean princess, I found I had a greedy ear for his stories of courage and suffering, of a lost way of life, so far away.

But I learned too late the one way Theseus was like my father: in his willingness to exploit an opportunity. Once he saw the knowledge I possessed, my understanding of the way goods and people passed onto and off of our island, he began his campaign to make me help him. To help his people. He wasn’t subtle. He appealed to my compassion, my sense of justice, two things so newly born in me I scarcely believed the risk he took in trusting them. But perhaps it was precisely because he saw me differently than anyone had before—as someone with values of her own instead of a mere gear in the family machine—that made me first love him, and then agree to help him.

And so I gave him the silver string of numbers that would open the coded locks to my father’s secret docks. I drew a map through the maze of warehouses that would lead him there, to a clean, fast, boat, registered in another name, to another country. Big enough for all his people.

But not before I made him promise to take me with him.

Our escape would have gone smoothly if my brother had not been waiting for us at the dock. In olden days, Theseus’s fight with him would have become a legend. In our fallen times, it was swift, brutal, and desperate. It might have gone badly for us, if my brother had not, in a crucial moment, noted my presence and lost his concentration. 

I married Theseus on the first island we stopped at. For the papers, course. Part of me knew that’s all he wanted from me. Despite the dangers I had run for him, I wasn’t truly one of them, the people from his village, those to whom he’d pledged his life. But part of me, some newly tender, aching part of me, believed there might be more. 

The one time we made love was the night after the civil marriage service. The sex seemed ceremonial. He kissed me as solemnly as if I were a goddess to whom he made offering, and I lay under him, awed and willing, but cold as a stone.

In the morning, he was gone, and all his people with him. I soon found he had sold my father’s boat to buy them safe passage north. And so there I was, alone and penniless in a vast camp of refugees, on an island of fishermen, surrounded by the cruel sea. Bereft of both my birth family and my chosen one. What was there for me but to run mad? So when the other women began to speak of breaking out of the camp, of rioting through the town, I joined them.

+++

Our days pass slowly on the yacht _Ecstasy_. We go from island to island, searching for beaches yet untouched by the current chaos. We eat, we drink, we get high, and we dance late into the night. I still read the papers, follow the political news on the sophisticated tablet Dionysus bought me. It is hard to not to notice the way this sea becomes a graveyard. But always his mouth, his hands, his drugs, call me back to the bed we share, the intoxication of his touch. The world seems far away. My father ruled as a king rules, through manipulation and deal-making; Theseus led as a prince leads, through devotion to his people and sacrifice on their behalf; but Dionysus holds his power as lightly as a god--we who stay with him do so out of love.

“What will you do next?” he asks me sometimes. 

I do not know. Half of me longs to join one of the few charitable groups that still patrol these waters, rescuing the lost. The other half wants only to remain in the consoling luxury of his ship, his bed. Meanwhile, the days slip by.

“Stay with me,” he says. “I’ll make you a star.”

Perhaps someday I’ll let him.


End file.
